


The Difference Between Bedding and a Burial

by 3RatMoon



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Banter, Character Study, Dissociation, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-10-18 13:51:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17582105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3RatMoon/pseuds/3RatMoon
Summary: It wasn’t that Castille didn’t feel anything. She felt plenty of things just fine.





	The Difference Between Bedding and a Burial

**Author's Note:**

  * For [noiselesspatientspider](https://archiveofourown.org/users/noiselesspatientspider/gifts).



> Happy Secret Samol, noiselesspatientspider!!! Thanks for a topic that got me to think about a character I truly enjoy but rarely write about. Oh, and some nerd is in there, too. ;P
> 
> I chose the title because bedding and burial are both geology terms  
> Get it  
> because castille  
> rocks
> 
> Anyway, please enjoy!!

It wasn’t that she didn’t feel anything. She felt plenty of things just fine.

In her early days, stumbling out of an abandoned factory and into the blazing sunlight outside, Castille had no memory to speak of, nothing to go on besides whim or intuition. She felt things out as she went, building a sense of self out of piles of likes and dislikes. She liked cats. She didn’t like bugs. She liked flowers. She liked the smell of oranges. She saw a metal sign that read Castille Street in bright blue and gold, and she liked that name, so she took it for herself.

Castille liked walking around the city, especially at night. The city, which she had learned was called Marielda, was anywhere between warm and sweltering during the day, and though the heat never bothered her the way it bothered other people (she was not quite like other people, she already knew), she found that she quite liked the coolness that set into the stone walls and streets after the sun had set. In the night, the city came alive in a whole new way, all sorts of people coming out of where they had been hiding away from the heat. They weren’t all necessarily good people, especially as it got later, but Castille didn’t mind much. She found these kinds of people to be more interesting. They inhabited the in-between places of the city, like the cats, slinking through shadows and alleys and gathering on rooftops. They were never the same as her— tall and pale and solid all the way through, like stone— but they weren’t quite like other people, either, and that was close enough.

When she eventually fell in with the Tea Witches, she found that she liked tea quite a lot, even if she couldn’t drink. She liked tea, and spices, and nice dresses with lacy trims. The dresses turned out to be quite helpful at diverting stares, too, people assuming that she wore the long sleeves and gloves and wide-brimmed hats because she was a modest lady, and not because she was hiding her strange marbled skin and blank, pupiless eyes.

When she first met Hitchcock, she found him likable, but that was different from liking him. That, she wasn’t quite sure of, even as he continued to insist on her involvement, pulling her further and further into his orbit. However, as it turned out, the more she got to know the dancer-dueler, the less likeable he became, and the more she decided that she liked him.

Siege and Aubrey were a little easier. Castille liked how Siege spoke his mind instead of dancing around it, and she liked how Aubrey tried to always be helpful in her shy, bumbling way. Still, it wasn’t until one day on a job when she saw the look in Aubrey’s eye as she opened a flask of fire oil, saw Siege grin a sharktooth-grin and effortlessly throw a man over his head, that she _really_ started to like them.

And Maelgwyn? She hated him almost from the moment she met him, and that was precisely why she liked him.

Contrary to popular belief, she could feel physical things, too. She couldn’t taste much (probably since she couldn’t eat or drink anyway), but she could smell things fine, and she could see and hear, too. She couldn’t feel pressure, temperature, or texture as well as most people, but she managed. She learned what was too hot or cold for her friends, how to handle items with a delicate hand.

One of her favorite things to do became peeling oranges. She liked the meditative process, taking a small cut and slowly working it around and around the fruit sitting inside until the peel came away in one long spiral. The smell of the orange would fill the space, which she loved, and she often would hang up the curling peels in her rooms like decorations until they had dried and their smell faded. Her enthusiasm was curbed by the other members of the Six, who couldn’t handle eating all of the oranges Castille kept peeling, but after that, if ever they came into the headquarters with an orange in hand, they always smiled and offered it to her first.

So, really, it wasn't that she didn't feel things. She did, and sometimes she didn't want to, anymore.

Even though she didn't talk about it much, she knew what she was, kind of. She knew when she saw a patrol of them and recognized herself in their pale, too-smooth skin and hair frozen in stony curls. Without meaning to, she tried not to think of it too much. She hadn't even gone back to the factory in Iris Parish where she first woke until Aubrey asked about it.

“It's okay, I was just curious,” she said when Castille didn't immediately respond. “I, uh, I guess I just wondered if there were others there. The Pala-din have to be made _somewhere_ , right?”

When Castille went to the old factory again, it was still abandoned. There were dozens of half-carved pieces, all with the same form as her— the same face, the same veins of Marielda Obsidian maring their otherwise perfect features. Aubrey guessed that the magical nature of the obsidian had something to do with Castille's impromptu sentience, but she never found any evidence to support the idea. Castille never found anything else, either, even though she kept going back to the factory, again and again, until it started to feel something like home.

She always liked walking in the city. After she started studying the Pala-din more, she discovered that her wanderings sometimes followed patrol routes. Did some of the old programming still exist in her, even after whatever happened to make her what she was? She always liked walking in the city, and sometimes if she just relaxed and let her feet take her where they will…

She started to go out sometimes, especially after a particularly rough job with the Six. Siege and Aubrey tended to squirrel themselves away with their personal projects for a bit, anyway, and the Hitchcocks were… well, themselves.

(There were two of them, it turned out, and that she hadn't thought to look into it even as they kept dropping hints left them feeling _very_ hurt, Edmund especially.)

She would go out, at night usually, without any of her layers of skirts and sleeves and hats, just the carved approximation of clothes she woke up with. No-one stared at her when she went like that, at least not in the usual way. People just thought that she was another Pala-din on patrol, and when she closed her eyes and stepped back from herself… she was.

She didn't know where she went when she let the programming buried somewhere inside her run its course. Sometimes, she woke with dirt smeared on her hands. Blood, once or twice. She still didn't remember anything, though, and that thrilled her. She could feel the pressure of a heist gone wrong, or the pain of her friends that she couldn't do anything to help, or the deep frustration of feeling without a true place in the world, one that isn't abandoned or hidden and threatened every day, one with more than just four other people that she really connected with, who she really knew and who really knew her… She could feel all of that, and then she could just put it down and leave it behind her like so much debris on the cobbled streets. She could go somewhere that none of it mattered, because she didn't see, or hear, or smell, or especially feel, anything at all.

Of course, all of that fell apart after she and the rest of the Six tried to steal that book from Memoriam College.

After that, things seemed to quiet down for a while, but it wasn’t a peaceful quiet, really. Castille spent a lot of time worrying about Siege and Aubrey, and the Hitchcocks, too. But, no one wanted to talk about that heist. In some ways, Castille didn’t want to, either, which is why she didn’t push the subject. After everything, she was afraid of what might happen if she broke that tense quiet. She was afraid to lose them.

In the end, it felt safer to talk to Maelgwyn, a total stranger who she had watched erase a ghost from existence like a stray mark on a drawing. He was infuriating, leaving her no means of contact except for a place and a time of day that he would meet her, and then always arriving late and frequently not arriving at all. Even so, they had common ground in their missing memories, and Castille couldn’t run away from her problems, anymore. So, she tried to talk them over with him.

When it came to the Six, though, it still felt like she was running away. She was just using a different route.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Maelgwyn said to her when she told him. “You have enough to worry about already.”

He wasn’t wrong. At Memoriam College, she found out that she actually was someone before— a powerful mage who left her own body to preserve her life. Charter Castille… no wonder she thought that name on the sign looked nice all those years ago. She thought she could feel her sometimes, the shadows of feelings so deep it was like they came from someone else.

She thought about these things, even as she grinned at Maelgwyn and said, “Says the person who doesn’t even care if he shows up to our dates or not.”

Maelgwyn had been about to reach for his drink, a mix of some kind of alcohol and hibiscus cordial that shone gemlike in the sun, but instead he put his hand to his chest in mock-scandal. “I’m a busy man!” he exclaimed. “Besides, I would _definitely_ show up if it were a date.”

Castille grinned. “Somehow, I doubt it.”

“Did you want to find out?” Maelgwyn asked, eyebrow up.

“You _wish.”_

They laughed, and Maelgwyn took a drink. The quiet was just long enough for Castille to start thinking again.

“It doesn’t feel real, somehow,” she said, picking at a thread on her sleeve.

“What doesn’t?” Maelgwyn asked.

Castille shrugged. “All of it. Being what I am now, but also knowing that I was someone else before— a _mage._ A mage who was conspiring with _gods,_ possibly against _other_ gods...”

“Don’t forget that we were enemies, as well!” Maelgwyn chimed in.

“Who says we aren’t enemies right now?” Castille shot back.

Maelgwyn laughed again. Castille couldn’t help smiling back. He was wearing a broad-brimmed hat, to keep the sun out of his eyes as much as to conceal some of his identity, and his hair was starting to grow long enough that it was poking out from underneath in bits and curls. It was a pretty bad look for him, honestly.

“You gonna keep growing that out?” she asked, gesturing to him. “You really should get it cut soon if you’re not.”

“I _am_ growing it out, actually,” Maelgwyn replied smoothly, but he adjusted his hat self-consciously as he did so, which made Castille snort.

“You’re terrible!” Maelgwyn exclaimed.

“Right back at you, asshole,” Castille answered, grinning. “Try showing up two weeks in a row, next time.”

They had been doing this for months. Castille didn’t really feel much better at night, when the darkness closed in around her and felt like it would stay there forever. However, in that moment, with the sun shining bright overhead and flowers blooming all around her as she shared insults and secrets with one of the most powerful idiots in the city… She felt alright.

She liked it. She liked _him,_ maybe. When she thought about it too much, she felt something like the fear she felt when she considered trying to talk to the Six. But, she was starting to get better at not thinking about things too much, at least.

Maybe Maelgwyn’s attitude _was_ starting to rub off on her.

“Still, I think I have a lead,” he was saying when she started listening again. “The child of an old general that I worked with before. They might have something… connections, maybe an old journal of his…”

Castille nodded, her smile not teasing this time. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“Yeah…”

For a moment, Maelgwyn didn’t look like some strange costumed dramatist on the run from the theatre, all broad gestures and obvious flair, even when he was trying to play it cool. He was almost shy as he shifted in his seat. He looked both younger and older than he was. Tired. Uncertain.

Castille didn’t know how she felt about it.

“How about a toast?” she asked, lifting her glass. It was empty, Maelgwyn having drained it ages ago, but she kept it at their table to seem less conspicuous, like she might still get it refilled.

Maelgwyn, of course, looked delighted by the offer. He was a bit fond of making toasts, which was the other reason why Castille kept a glass around. He smiled bright and eager as he lifted his cup.

“What shall we toast to, my lady?”

“To never calling me ‘my lady’ like that _ever_ again,” Castille replied, and they laughed, but then she paused, thinking.

“How about… a toast to finding what we need,” she said, finally. She had the strange urge to swallow. “Without losing what we want to keep.”

Maelgwyn was quiet for just a moment, but then he seemed to come back to himself.

“I’ll drink to that,” he said, and he lifted his glass to hers, smiling his brilliant smile.

Castille kind of wished she could drink.


End file.
